• newslepear
  • Posts
  • 🍐 47: Dev Influencer marketing, great ad of an infra product, and a tiny copy change that crushed it.

🍐 47: Dev Influencer marketing, great ad of an infra product, and a tiny copy change that crushed it.

Author

Jakub Czakon
November 26, 2023

Hey,

I’ve decided to take December off from socials and the newsletter and think about how I want to do content in 2024.

So, see you in January, happy holidays, and happy new pear 🍐 !

This week on the agenda:

  • How to do dev influencer marketing series from Itamar Ben Yair

  • "CI" vs "Build" A/B test from Earthly

  • and a great LinkedIn ad from Run.ai

  • + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

🪧 Promo

So you built an active community around your open-source product.

How do you find companies that may actually buy?

crowd.dev helps you find those high-intent accounts by combining user signals from your product, docs, support Slack, GitHub, Linkedin, and more.

Then it syncs it all with your CRM so that the team can go at it.

Reasonably priced and available in the cloud or self-hosted (and open-source). Take a look ->

Developer marketing insights

1. How to do dev influencer marketing series

Itamar Ben Yair is a dev marketing consultant specializing in dev acquisition through ads and other paid campaigns like influencer marketing.

In his recent LinkedIn post series, he started going over how various dev tool campaigns do influencer marketing.

  • They have very valuable and useful but “boring” products: scrapers and proxy networks

  • You want to reach the audience who is not looking for a solution, to grow awareness and demand in the market

  • And you know that unless someone needs scrapers or proxy networks they will not watch a 20min tutorial about it

What did they do?

They advertised through product placements:

  • They figure out what are the bigger problems where their product solves a “boring” but crucial piece

  • They find dev influencers who create video tutorials

  • They sponsor video tutorials showing the solution to a bigger problem

  • And they are featured when the influencer gets to the point of the video where the problem they solve arises

I like how this is aligned with the video viewer, dev influencer, and company goals. Win-win-win.

2. Run.ai Linkedin ad

Attractive ad creative for an infra product that runs in a terminal?

Hard, but Run.ai did that.

Infra products are not "obviously cool".

There is no shiny UI, no happy people wearing your sneakers,

So what do you show in your ads?

First off, the rules still apply:

• Catch your audience's attention
• Say what you do in their language
• Better yet, show how it actually does it

And Run.ai ai and MLOps infra tool managed to create a beautiful LinkedIn ad:

• They catch attention with the code visual
• They say what they do quickly with "Dynamic Fractional GPU using One Command"
• They extend on that in the post copy with an action-driven "Open Terminal -> Run Command -> Boom"
• The code shows what it feels like to use the tool
• And it shows you the result -> fractional GPUs

Job well done!

3. "CI" vs "Build" A/B test from Earthly

Copy that lands makes a huge difference in dev tool website conversion.

Earthly proved it with this "tiny" change.

So I am a huge believer in good copy.

Not the clever one but the one that is written with words that your customers use.

That is rooted in product and research.

But I often hear devs or founders say things like "it's just copy".

It is not "just copy" it is your message, it is your positioning.

It is the difference between  "cool, let's try it" and "now for me, whatever".

He shared that at some point they decided to run this A/B test with just a "tiny" change.

They changed the word "CI" -> "Build" across the homepage.

  • Control -> "Earhly makes CI super simple"

  • Test -> "Earhly makes builds super simple"

And their core website conversion doubled.

So next time you work on website copy give it some more thought and you may be surprised that "just copy" made a huge difference.

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me

  • I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions and longer-term advising. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. See how it works -> 

  • You can also promote your product/service/job in this newsletter. But I want to 100% make sure this will add value for the readers so… Let’s talk first ->

2. Join our Slack community

1200+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking about things like this:

3. Bonus links to check out

Reply

or to participate.